I’m making slow headway on my novel, The Ark, and I’ve decided to stay with voice of my bad side, Deirdre Sinclair:

I liked how it was tedious, feeding a few pages at a time, watching them chewed, coiling up into strips of nothing, but I had to empty the bucket every ten minutes. It was supposed to eat staples, but it didn’t. They jammed and I had to pry them out. And then I had to wait until it wasn’t over-heated. The stacks bent into each other, investments and secrets, numbers, names, letters from my lawyer and Nani. The file on Crystal had been sent to me, but I had never looked. I was scared of seeing the bills, the intimacies of her lost life. She had spent so little. She had made money on everything, even the apartment, just by staying in it. She had paid for the rehab on her own and didn’t even know it. I thought I should cry, thinking of her, but there was nothing. I missed her. That was it. I needed a bigger shredder.